Getsocio Takes the Course on Turning into Multi-purpose E-commerce Platform

A new massive release of our project Getsocio officially came out on April 7, 2016.

The release was preceded with three months of intensive work. The prime objective was to make Getsocio ready to become a truly general-purpose e-commerce platform.

Release summary

Let's explain our current development efforts. The improvements included in the current release have primarily technical nature. Getsocio e-commerce platform was initially designed for small and mid-sized business owners. It allowed them to easily create daily deal and group buying websites. However, the time has come to turn it into a more multipurpose service. Besides, through the years of functioning and continuous development, the project accumulated a number of issues, often implicit or disguised, needed to be addressed. So, the majority of updates within this release were to some point forced and prepared.

A quick list of updates:

A standalone CMS application (promo site) was launched. We built it on the base of our CMS for anadea.info

Migration of content from all the components of old Getsocio app to the new promo site.

Reorganization of the application engine for proper operation of public, admin and tenant's parts of the app.

As can be seen from the list, the release has provided some important and needful enhancements. They may not look revolutionary; however, some tasks that seemed easy to do, in fact required considerable effort and research.

One of the interesting tasks was transferring data from MySQL to Postgres. It was solved by using a data loading tool for PostgreSQL - pgloader.

The operating system has been updated to 3 versions up at once. Thus, we made a transition from Ubuntu 10.10, that is no longer supported, to the new version 14.04. We also used Docker. This solution allowed us to isolate supporting programs (Postgres, Postfix) involved in the work of our applications from Ubuntu.

Due to the transition to https for the tenant's sites, we have mastered the installation of SSL certificates without any troubles for customers. From now on, free SSL certificates are issued for all tenants with the help of Dokku and Let's Encrypt.

There are lots of other updates and improvements, including a comprehensive software refactoring and cleaning of the codebase.

Technologies

The updated technology stack as of the moment of release:

Ruby 2.3;

Rails 4;

Postgres 9.5;

Dokku 0.4.14;

Docker 1.10.3;

Ubuntu 14.04;

Let's Encrypt.

Team

The team responsible for this release was headed by one of our leading engineers Sergey Tokarenko. Sergey inspired and motivated the team with his hard work, enthusiasm and full commitment to success of the project.

The core of the development team consisted of Andrey Bulava (DevOps), Alexey Olefirenko (back end) and Andrey Bakuta (front end). Content migration and updating was carried out by our copywriters Elena Gamasenko and Olga Veretskaya. Vadim Eremichev performed QA testing. In addition to permanent team members, Alexey Kudryashov, Stanislav Litvinov, Galina Kustova, Tatyana Ryzhkova and some other Anadea's employees also made a valuable contribution to the release.

All the team members were highly engaged in the project and spared neither time nor effort to make this release happen.

Finally

Thus, the preparatory phase is successfully completed. Our developers are eager to proceed, and new releases of Getsocio multi-purpose e-commerce platform are on the way.